Mystery Men - A Review

It seems that my last post offended a few people. That's too bad. I won't say that they can lick my balls (because I don't allow them to) but they should spend a bit more time sorting themselves out that whinning at me.

One thing they should do is check out the film Mystery Men. Mystery Men is a very much underrated wee movie that I picked to watch because I couldn't find anything better to watch in the video shop.



Firstly you'd think with it's cast (Ben Stiller, William H.Macy, Greg Kinnear, Tom Waits to name four) that if you hadn't heard of it then it must be shit. This is a fair assumption and the film wasn't successful at the box office. Mystery Men, however, is an exception to the rule.

It's like a parody of the Watchmen (though it pre-dates it), with three superheroes with crap non-powers trying to unsuccessfully establish themselves on the superhero scene monopolised by Captain Amazing (Kinnear).

Captain Amazing is so amazing that he has run out of decent bad guys to fight and as such is losing his product endorsements (he has product badges all over his superhero costume - Pepsi gets a particularly nice wee bit of exposure but I still think it tastes like someone dropped a bar of soap in a vat of Cola).

This leads to him overseeing the release of his greatest foe Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffry Rush). Things don't go according to plan and Captain Amazing ends up Frankenstein's captive.

This clears the way for our inept superheroes to save the day but even they realise need some extra help. The scene where they try out new members of the gang looks like a typical Saturday in a comic book geek's backyard. (Pencil Head and Son of Pencil head being two who sadly don't make the grade).

Kel Mitchell deserves a mention as the superhero with the silliest power: Invisible Boy, who can only turn invisible when no one is looking at him, though he has strong competition from the rest of the cast.

It builds up to a nice fun goodies vs baddies set piece that gives some big old chuckles and we don't mind the ending being predictable at all because hey it's a parody (but not in the shit lazy way that Hollywood has become all too accustomed to producing in recent years - Wayans brothers you have a lot to answer for).

All in all this was a fun few hours spent having a few chuckles and I didn't feel deep once, thank fuck.